A man had a fright when he sat down for breakfast to discover a snake in his cereal box, an animal charity said as it revealed its most surprising rescues of the last year.

It was one of a series of incidents highlighted by the RSPCA as they rounded up their top animal rescues of 2018, including a venomous scorpion, a cat impaled on railings, and a hamster rescued by a hand-crafted ladder after being stuck in a pipe for almost a week.

A goat who got her head stuck between the bars of a metal fence in Norton, Stockton-on-Tees